Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green has an interesting discussion going on at his place based on a post by Scott ‘Lum’ Jennings about PvP games and how to design them. I’ve put my tuppence into the ring which I may expand on here later. In the meantime go, read and comment.

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3 Comments

Lee Saggerssaid,

Theres alot of people saying the same thing in different ways on that blog.

Personally i agree that Guild Wars has a very stable model for pvp, Most of the high end gear is only visually better and the game relies on picking the right skills to win, not on bringing your High_End_Hammer_01

Rewarding failiure opens up the possibility for afk farming like in WoW’s Alterac Valley. WoW’s arena system is another example of abusing failiure rewards. Most pve guilds will divide thier people up into teams with the sole intent to lose 10 games a week so they can get some nice gear once a month for nothing more than 25 minutes a week of chatting on vent.

Rewarding ONLY success creates a wider power band. DaoC’s high RR gank crews are an example. roaming the world and blowing all thier Cooldowns to destroy people.

Combine the two and make the success rewards small bonuses that can build up over time (DaoC’s RP’s are a good example when not introducing “I Win” buttons.

To make a good harcore pvp game you cant soften bits for the newbies, But if you want to make money on your pvp game you do.

PvP designed to keep everyone happy will do that and you will keep players.

Flimsaid,

You need to make sure your “failure rewards” either slow down or stop as people move away from noobness.

I.e. a brand new player gets rewarded for surviving 20 seconds.

A player who’s been around a week or two doesn’t, they might get extra points for actually landing a hit on someone, but the gank group player gets nothing (or very little) unless it’s a full on kill.

You can either do this with cutoffs or exponential requirements for the rewards – e.g. getting 1 RP a second (if daoc had an arena) won’t do much at RR2 never mind RR10, but it’ll get you up to RR1L2 fairly quick.

Sure you could idle in scenarios for a year but it’ll still only get you a rank or two 🙂 (or you could cap the amount you get per day, make it even less worthwhile for anyone above complete-noob level)

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